Tired Of Thinking Like An Ugly Sister? Step Into Your Cinderella Slippers and Rock!

It’s epidemic.

Smart, talented people, out of touch with how capable they are.

Waiting for some fairy godmother to come along and make it okay for them to wear the coveted crystal slippers.

You know how it is. The boss you want to endorse you. The client you want to adulate you. The community you want to follow you.

Of course, that’s not what you show the world. Out there you put your best face forward and get on with things. But behind the mask, the theater make-up is cracking.

You come to me because you feel you should be more than you are. Confident, successful, happy. A mixture of all three. You want to stop feeling so fearful and anxious about things that other professional people seem to sail through.

Cinderella, you just don’t get that the crystal slippers were yours and yours alone in the beginning.

And, while you’re getting your head round that last line, here’s a little more story to share how the metamorphosis from ugly sister to Cinderella happens.

Feeling phony

In the beginning you use words to describe yourself that bring tears to my eyes.

“I’m pathetic,” you’ll say. Or, “I’m crap.”

“Any moment now and I’ll be discovered for the phony person that I am,” you say.

Like your years of study count for nothing. Like your hard work has never been translated into great job offers, promotions and client wins. Like there’s not a group of folks around who have only solid respect for you.

Indeed, you share your surprise for the nice things people say about you. It confuses you. Doesn’t make sense.

I offer back your paradoxical positions. That other people rate you. That you don’t rate yourself.

You start to get a little curious of the gap.

The Gap

You start to see that it’s such a painful place to live. And yet you know it so well. It has been a constant throughout your life.

Except now it’s killing you. You’re tired of it. The energy required to keep managing the difference between the outside and inside you is huge, and taking its toll.

You do a little reading around or even talk to some other folks. There are badges you can wear to explain why it’s okay for you to think like you’re an Ugly Sister when you’re really Cinderella.

Control freak is one with which you identify. Closely followed by Perfectionist.  There are loads of them in the business world. At least identifying with them gives you a faint sense of belonging.

Dig further and you might find some psychologists telling you that you have an Inferiority Complex. That you live in a perpetual state of needing to prove to yourself and others how good you are.

They may even snigger and nod and tell you that most of the people in top jobs and in positions of power have this kind of thing going on. That it’s what drives them to set higher and higher expectations for themselves from which other people benefit.

I ask you if these labels really serve you; if they really help assuage the tension in your soul. If they help the Cinderella locked inside, tending to the fireplace, when she really wants to go to the ball.

You tell me, “Not really.”

How come?

But you do want to understand how come Cinderella got locked away in the first place. And, en route to unleashing her, we spend some time on the backstory.

Often there’s the tale of the bright child whose ability was so taken for granted that you were never able to cement it in the foundations of your own being. The parent who always went looking for the missing 2% of a 98% exam success. And how you learned from this never to see how phenomenal your achievements are, but to focus instead on your inevitable human errors.

Alternatively, I hear the one about the parent whose own need to be validated and endorsed was ahead of yours, leaving your hunger for positive mirroring unsatisfied. So, that you learned to seek, but not to expect or take in, validation from folks you interact with.

Poor Cinders

I feel sorry for your pain.

But we don’t dwell there. Ugly Sister thinking may have held you back in the past, but it doesn’t mean you’re destined to feel like the poor relation forever.

So I ask you what was missing from back then that you need to give yourself right now.

“Permission to be okay,” you say. “No matter what.”

“Permission to sparkle and shine?”

As I ask you that, I see you cringe. You don’t want to be big headed and pseudo-egotistical like some of the people you brush up against.

So, I now challenge you with the polarity of your options. “On the one hand, you feel you need to disown your strengths. On the other, you think you have to rub them in people’s faces. Isn’t there another way?”

You shall go to the ball

You’re silent. Thinking. Daring to touch the gift of who you are.

“I suppose there’s also my own way,” you say.

“Your own way?”

“Yeah, just allowing me to be myself.”

“Stepping into your own Cinderella slippers and rocking?”

You laugh. You’ve changed state and I can hear and see it.

I ask you how it feels to connect with your own way.

“Liberating,” you say. “Like I’ve just cast off the weight of the world.”

“That’s because you have,” I say.

This is no fairy tale

Thing is, this is not a fairy tale. It’s the kind of place people get to in daring to do deep change work on themselves. It’s the kind of work I love being party to. And I’ve seen it for real, in different formats of this, in my life and work this week.

So how about you? Do you have what it takes to step out of Ugly Sister thinking and into Cinderella’s shoes.

Or are you going to keep waiting for someone else to do it for you?

photo credit: Denzil~

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